Well. Holy Mother of Whoops in the world of my computer. Here’s the story: I was getting a bus error, sporatically, on start up. So we thought, hey, maybe it’s time for a partition. And a revised OS.

I dropped off my computer baby at Jason’s and went to work. He installed OSX. That’s cool. So I went to get it, and went home…and OSX didn’t seem to include OS 9.2, which meant….I couldn’t open a damn file, or get online. (Weep weep weep!) Now, you have to understand, my computer is an extension of my brain, and I keep all phone numbers on it. Which of course is DUMBER than DUMB. So now I have no connection, and no phone numbers to get help. I felt like I had been left on a deserted island. Then I found a message from emma on my machine, so I could retrieve at least her phone number…and then she gave me Jason’s number…

Weep weep. I called him, we made plans…and I went to work getting ready for my 9am meeting.

And THEN…there I was, on the phone with emma, and my power cord started sparking. Blue sparks. Unbelieveable. I was so shocked I just laughed, I didn’t even unplug it first. I’ve had this happen before, but not this part of the cord…an ibook has two parts to it’s power cord (don’t most lap tops?): one part is an AC adapter, which looks like this:

And then there’s a second part, just a regular cord, that plugs into the wall. My AC adapter (aka the puck, the yo yo) has exploded twice…there’s a defect in the cord, apparently…it turns green inside and then BANG, it goes.

But that’s not what happened this time. This time it was the other cord, the normal cord. The outer casing the cord bubbled even.

So the next day, now we’re at yesterday: I went in at 9am and had a meeting with one of my advisers, which was extremely fun. We talked about Latin America, and I had a really great time. I hope I covered all the important bits…I got to talk about all kinds of interesting stuff. More about that later. After the meeting I nipped over to the computer store with my pathetic bubbling power cord. I saw the same tech guy…the one I terrified when the leaf off my apple popped off. He didn’t need any prelimiaries. I guess I’ve got a reputation…he just gave me a new cord.

And after that I started on the LONG day of trying to fix my computer. We pulled off OSX, and then tried to copy a version of OS 9.2 off Jason’s computer and onto mine. That seemed to work well. So off I went home, exhausted, it took us…sheesh, we worked on it all day. And I kept working on it all evening, while I was still working on my next meeting. Now, at home….

I can’t open Eudora. I can open a browser, but…it’s as if the whole internet is written in wingdings. Gobbledeegook. Jason sounded scared, something is terribly wrong. My control strip is gone. I didn’t even try to print anything at that point…I knew I was lucky enough to have a telnet app open. And I can’t find my system disk. Jason sounds like he’s on the edge. I tried to reinstall 9.2, but got a error message about ‘big morsels’. (I had no idea my computer had morsels.) So basically I have an OS hanging on by its fingernails, and it doesn’t like to be trifled with. Meanwhile, Jason finds a proper system disk, tests, and burns me a copy.

Today: reading my heart out in preparation for a 9am meeting tomorrow, and hoping against hope that that disk will fix my problems. I picked it up at 4pm, hit a couple of libraries, and meandered back home again. I did a clean install of 9.1, with great success, and then upgraded to 9.2. I reinstalled the Sympatico access manager, the software that interacts with my dsl modem, restarted and….got a bus error. Yes, I think after all that I can say that the bus error seems to be the result of….the access manager. Oh yes. The fact that I need (yes, need) to be online may well be the cause of my grief…(sympatico, sympatico, why do you hurt me so?)

So Now I’m back. I’m running IE 5 again, I’m running eudora again (minus the 15 zillion email messages I had saved in there, which is probably a blessing), and I didn’t lose and serious data. WOOOOOO!

I did miss a panel of papers I had been completely looking forward to…just because I couldn’t get my email for two days and I forgot it was yesterday. (Weep weep.) Oh, I can’t tell you how sad I am about that, but at that time I was reading and wrestling with software, so I didn’t actually have the time to spare. Still.

That’s my update. What a week.